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.Carp in summer.There will be no hiding it.So she remains as she is, half-bare and gold, when Chang'e arrives home.Her wife drops everything she's been carrying, a pile of crackling paper and plastic."What happened? What did you do to yourself?""Should that not be what did this to me?""Nothing could have done this to you unless you allowed it.You're very ill.""Not exactly." She does not protest when Chang'e presses her to sit."It's fine.They're only scars now, and in a day even those will heal.The rest is Fusang's fruit, a useful edge should I need to directly confront Dijun."Chang'e rubs one of the patches where fire laps under flesh."Xihe.She could've granted you this without hurting you.I know you killed her children—""Were a demon to hurt Julienne, you'd permit them no leniency.""I'd see them dead just the once.You've already been through mortal death and afterlife.Promise me.Don't do this again.For eons you've repented.It's enough.""It's not so simple.""Promise me." Chang'e presses her mouth to Houyi's fingers, lips fluttering over each knuckle one by one.It reminds Houyi, immediately and acutely, that they haven't touched since Chang'e came back, that too much has kept them preoccupied and apart.Their thoughts might have coincided, for Chang'e looks up."I could be very, very careful.""No.""No?""You don't have to be too careful." Houyi licks the edge of her wife's lips, the inside of her mouth and the rimed teeth that do not thaw under Fusang's heat.As her duty has changed Houyi, so her wife's sentence has altered Chang'e.Immortal doesn't mean immutable; better than most they know this.Her belt falls, a clatter of buckle and leather on parquet floor.She stays Chang'e's hand and clasps it to her breast."The months you were away—to bear your absence is to suffer a wound.If I've ever given you cause to doubt me.""You haven't." Chang'e traces her thumb over the base of Houyi's throat, and pushes her back—far back, until her head and shoulders are off the mattress, until she's suspended under her wife's weight sharp as winter.She whispers "Chang'e—" like a bowstring pulled to its tensile threshold, stretched between one harsh gasp and the next."When you say my name so," Chang'e murmurs, "there's nothing I wouldn't do.Nothing."Houyi's hands tighten on fistfuls of linens as her teeth clench down on her wife's name.It is one word; it is every word.She dangles, limp, from the bed's edge, her pulse a drum against the thin shell of her skull.Her voice, when it emerges, is hoarse."You'll have to let me up."It is some time before she gathers herself and grips her wife's hip, pushing away the skirt with a haste that causes her wife to laugh, then to cry out.They settle twined, side by side."Sometimes I forget that you can be so sudden, so definite." Chang'e sighs, her eyelashes tickling Houyi's cheek."I've missed you so much.Your skin, your mouth.""But not my conversation or company?" Houyi navigates the width and curvature of her wife's spine.They've mapped and measured each other so well, every knot of bone and tendon, every indentation and ridge, the width of waist and thighs.Houyi cannot remember a time when this knowledge, this awareness of Chang'e, was not embedded in her deep as marrow in bone."This must be the modern sensibility I've heard so much about.""Oh, shush, you haven't even taken me to dinner or bought me beautiful things." Chang'e wriggles when Houyi's hand traces up her calf, stops at the back of her knee."Take all of this off.Don't leave a stitch."She obliges, undoing hooks and buttons with fingers long made nimble from fletching.This time they pace themselves, and when they finally part to lie loose-limbed and sweat-glistening it is as if—for all she's told Julienne otherwise—they are new brides.Intoxicated, delighted, every care pushed aside.Houyi does not say that the year she's wrung out of Xihe will soon be up and that there might not be another after it.2.3Houyi listens to the push of water against water, the passage of pelicans and hornbills, and watches a parrot peck at a pomegranate.A white mynah flits by and settles on her shoulder.Animals often do that, drawn to her stillness, in blithe disregard of what she does.It is so lulled that it remains perching on her after a blue-white feather, the quill sharp as any arrowhead, strikes where she sat.By then she has stepped behind the lanky boy who smells of pomade and leather.She seizes his hair and, pulling it back, opens his throat.The mynah darts into the canopies.Houyi catches the body as it crumples; they are obscured from mortal sight and security cameras, but the blood may stain.She holds him over the water as he turns from boy to bird the size of a hound.His pinions are indigo, his belly ivory."Why did you kill him?""He believed he'd win unrivaled glory by attacking me." She wipes the blade on the feathers; later she will have to properly clean it."Do serpents not kill?""Only for food.He couldn't cast out his spirit in time—he died, in truth and finality, with his flesh.As they say, you have no mercy." The snake crosses her arms.She remains under palm shade, keeping a distance they both know is more cosmetic than useful."It's not even that you kill in anger.""I rarely do that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]